Spilling the Spanish Beans

Abstract

George Orwell was what they used to call a 'socialist'. A socialist was someone who believed that there were objective economic defects in capitalism which it was the moral duty of socialists to expose. They believed that their own economic system, based as it was on co-operation and planning rather than on competition and exploitation, was superior, and could be manipulated to produce greater social equality. There were many varieties of socialism as a universal Enlightenment idea but, when it was applied in different countries, it tended to reflect the national culture of those applying it. For about thirty years, somewhere between 1918 and 1951, it was possible that a socialist regime could have been established in Great Britain. As it was, between 1945 and 1950 economic conditions and tactical alliances combined to build a 'Welfare State' as near as the British got to operational socialism without fully endorsing it. Orwell has been accredited for his intellectual contribution to this British variant. This is fair comment, but until very late in the day he was a marginal figure, as most writers are. When he did get some influence, it was more on the right than on the left and it was posthumous, which is just as well because Orwell was a socialist to the end. In his writings, he did not spend much time on economics (as socialists were commonly expected to do). Far more interested in political and cultural matters, he wrote extensively on English manifestations, including colonialism. His fear and loathing of totalitarian forms, in Germany and the Soviet Union especially, and Britain's lone stand against Germany (1940 to 1941) led to an unusually emphatic 'left-Englishness' in his writing, which prevailed. Above all, he wanted to get at the truth. Like Antonio Gramsci, he believed that 'To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth' is 'a revolutionary act'. Indeed, Orwell's passion for the truth, and the language which conveys it, became his overarching political principle. Not all comrades shared his passion. They didn't have time for it, trusting more to their misunderstanding of history. They hoped that once 'The Revolution' (an almost mystical act of social transmutation made possible by the mass actions of the most exploited class, 'the proletariat') was in train, all would come good. But revolutions don't happen all that often and when they do they are very hard to control. When their violence is unleashed, a greater force is required and whosoever has that force, owns the revolution. Such times can be frightening for those who have to live through them and in Barcelona, in the spring of 1937, Mr and Mrs Orwell had to live through them. The Orwells were glad to get back to Hertfordshire, where life was quieter. Though they continued to believe in The Revolution, most far-left English socialists were destined more for the writer's chair than the barrack square. Orwell wrote to such effect that 'English socialism' was not so much something he joined, as something he helped to make. A strange fate for it then that in his last work, Nineteen Eighty Four, the party of totalitarian hate is called INGSOC, or